Saturday, October 30, 2010

Today, the incomparable Mütter Museum of Philadelphia will be hosting an epic Day of the Dead party. Stop by at noon or four PM to catch me expounding on medical museums, memento mori, and morbidity as keynote speaker; stay for the party, complete with food, drink, music and sugar skulls!

Hope very much to see you there.

The Mütter Museum’s 3nd Annual Day of the Dead FestivalCome celebrate this traditional Mexican holiday with an all-day event at the Mütter Museum! Decorate sugar skulls, enjoy traditional food and drink, visit the Museum, hear from guest speaker, artist Joanna Ebenstein and see an exclusive show by local personality Grover Silcox!

Accompanying the article is a video tour of The Morbid Anatomy Library which the magazine describes as "A Peek Inside a 'Morbid' Museum;" You can view the video above if you so choose.

You can read the article--and see the video in context!--by clicking here. For more about The Morbid Anatomy Library, click here. To find out more about Mark Jacobson's book The Lampshade--or purchase a copy!--click here. To find out about his recent Morbid Anatomy Presents lecture at Observatory, click here. To find out more about Obscura Antiques and Oddities and the new program "Oddities," click here and here, respectively.

"Oddities" premieres Nov. 4 at 9:30 p.m. on Discovery Channel; after the launch, it will air Thursdays at 8 PM. You can find out more about Obscura Antiques and Oddities by clicking here; you can see a recent MA Post on the story by clicking here. For more on the show--including a link to a story in the New York Post--see this recent post.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Morbid Anatomy is very excited to announce two wonderful Day of the Dead celebrations taking place this upcoming Day of the Dead and Halloween weekend!

On Saturday October 30th, Philadelphia's incomparable Mütter Museum will be hosting their 3rd Annual Day of the Dead Festival, where I will be giving two lectures as keynote speaker. The very next day--Sunday October 31st, aka Halloween proper--Morbid Anatomy will be co-hosting the Second Annual Observatory Day of the Dead Party, replete with authetic Red Hook Latin food vendors, a death piñata, traditional food and drinks, sugar skulls, a José Posada (see above) inspired community altar, costumes, Negra Modelo, live music and much, much more.

Hope to see you at one or both of these fantastic events (detailed below)! But either way, Feliz Dia de Muertos from Morbid Anatomy at our favorite time of the year!

Saturday October 30th [link]The Mütter Museum’s 3nd Annual Day of the Dead Festival

Come celebrate this traditional Mexican holiday with an all-day event at the Mütter Museum! Decorate sugar skulls, enjoy traditional food and drink, visit the Museum, hear from guest speaker, artist Joanna Ebenstein and see an exclusive show by local personality Grover Silcox!

Sponsored by the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

(NOTE: Registration is not required for daytime festivities and is free with Museum admission; registration IS required, with additional cost for admission, to Silcox production.)

Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) PartyAdmission: $5Date: Sunday, October 31stTime: 5 PM - ?Please R.S.V.P. to salvador.olguin@gmail.com for party planning purposes.

Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) is celebrated annually in Mexico during the last days of October and the first days of November. It is a party to honor the dearly departed by presenting offerings to them, building an altar, and inviting them to reunite with the living in a nightly feast including their favorite dishes and drinks. It has deep roots in ancient, pre-Hispanic celebrations, but it also integrates the Christian traditions brought to the country by the Spanish –the main celebration takes place on November 2nd, coinciding with All Saints Day.

On Sunday, October 31th, and for the second year in a row, Morbid Anatomy and Observatory will host a Day of the Dead party in tandem with author and scholar Salvador Olguin. This year, we will build an altar dedicated to the Economy. Traditionally, the Day of the Dead altar is dedicated to a person whose death is deeply felt by the people building it; in spite of some hopeful reports by some cheerful voices, our global Economy does not seem to be recovering quickly enough from its recent collapse. This year, we will bring her some offerings, attract her with a few bottles of tequila, and lure her back to the realm of the living with the fragrant smell of incense and marigolds. Feel free to collaborate with our altar building by bringing objects that express how deeply felt the departure of the Economy was for you and your close ones. We want to entice the ghost of the Economy to walk again among the living, to come back from the afterworld and celebrate with us, Mexican style.

Many of this year’s features are based in the art of Jose Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printer and illustrator who worked around the time of the Mexican Revolution (1910), and who used his art to satirize prominent figures of his era. His best-known works are his calaveras (skulls), etchings depicting dancing skeletons, skulls dressed up as Revolucionarios and politicians, etc. Since this November we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, it felt natural to honor Posada by having a live version of one of his most famous calaveras: La Catrina. Made by Posada as a depiction of the skeleton of a rich lady, La Catrina has come to represent a satirical version of Death herself in Mexico. At our party, La Catrina will mingle with our guests, and people will be able to have their picture taken with her, in front of our altar.

At this year’s Dia De Muertos party, you will also find pan de muerto, champurrado (a traditional Mexican beverage), sugar skulls, marigolds, Negra Modelo, traditional foods and crafts, a community altar, a piñata of death herself to dash to bits, live traditional music, a death themed slide show produced by Morbid Anatomy, and, of course, Redhook vendors taco truck supplying delicious and authentic foodstuffs. If you would like to dress appropriately for the occasion, you only need to take an old suit or dress, or wear the clothes of a person whose death means something for you, or simply wear your everyday clothes: everything works, as long as you add a touch of the hereafter to it –some make up to look a little pale, a skeleton suit, some dirt under your fingernails. Or you can go all the way and dress up like one of Posada’s Calaveras.

We hope you can join us! Feliz Dia de Muertos!

Salvador Olguin’s work has been published in magazines both in Mexico and in the US. He is the author of Seven Days, a multimedia theatrical piece that celebrates the convergence of traditions and hybridism that characterizes Mexico’s fascination with mortality. He has worked extensively with Mexican cultural artifacts related with death. He is currently performing research on the metaphoric uses of prostheses in literature and the visual arts, at New York University, as well as writing poems about the life of plants and the genealogy of intelligent machines. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico and is currently based in Brooklyn.

For more information on the Mütter Museum 3rd Annual Day of the Dead Festival, click here; for more information about the Observatory Dia de Muertos party, click here. To see photos from last year's Dia de Muertos Observatory Party--which will give you a sense of what you're in for--click here.

Radiolab's Sharon Shattuck on parasites tonight at Observatory! Full details below; hope to see you there.

Parasites: A User’s GuideA Short Film Screening with Filmmaker and Ecologist Sharon Shattuck, Radiolab AffiliateDate: Tuesday, October 26Time: 8:00Admission: $5

The word “parasite” comes with loads of vile connotations, but in nature, nothing is purely good or evil. In the 27-minute experimental documentary “Parasites: A User’s Guide,” filmmaker Sharon Shattuck embarks on a journey to decode some of the most misunderstood creatures on earth.

The dramatic rise in autoimmune diseases, asthma, and allergies since the turn of the last century has confounded scientists, but some researchers think they have uncovered the key to controlling the skyrocketing rates: tiny parasitic worms called ‘helminths.’ Using a blend of handmade and digital animation, film, and music, Sharon dives headlong into the controversial discourse surrounding ‘helminthic therapy,’ with help from scientific researchers, proactive patients and a renegade entrepreneur named Jasper Lawrence. Through the seeming oxymoron of the ‘helpful parasite,’ Sharon questions the nature of our relationship with parasites–and suggests a new paradigm for the future. “Parasites: A User’s Guide” is a film about ecology, healing, and worms.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and an active helminth patient.

Bio: Before moving to Brooklyn, Sharon Shattuck studied tropical botany, and worked as a researcher with the Field Museum and the Smithsonian Institute in Panama. Following a grad stint in documentary media, she now works as an animator with Wicked Delicate Films (producers of “King Corn,” 2007) in Brooklyn, and is a contributor to the WNYC science show ‘Radiolab.’ Now, Sharon is touring the mainstream film fest circuit with her quirky science film “Parasites: A User’s Guide,” demonstrating that science can be both informative AND entertaining.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Yes, the rumors, bizarre as they are, are true. Obscura Antiques and Oddities--my absolute favorite store in the world, see images above--is now the base, inspiration, location, and cast-provider for "Oddities," a new reality TV show (sic) that will be shown on The Discovery Channel starting next Thursday. The show stars not only friends and friends-of-the-blog Evan Michelson (Morbid Anatomy Library scholar in residence) and Mike Zohn--the proprietors or the inimitable Obscura Antiques--but also an array of other fascinating friends and collectors who travel in their circle.

With this cast, setting, and array of possible situations, "Oddities" will doubtless make unusually compelling reality television. I, for one--and please note, I generally HATE reality TV!--can't wait to see it!

More about the show--which premieres next Thursday, November 4th--from today's New York Post (which, although it seems to miss the point somewhat, provides a good description of the action):

Manhattan's own Obscura Antiques & Oddities and its owners, Mike Zohn and Evan Michelson, are the focus of a new series, "Oddities," premiering Nov. 4 at 9:30 p.m. on Discovery Channel. It'll air Thursdays at 9 p.m. thereafter.

The shop, located at 280 East 10th (between 1st Avenue and Avenue A) has a cornucopia of just-plain-weird stuff, like human gallstones, late 19th century poison bottles and bizarre medical instruments. And Zohn and Michelson seem just as colorful (he's a "creative taxidermy" winner; she's into Victorian mourning jewelry and was in a "Goth fetish band," whatever that is).

In the first episode, Mike finds a mummified cat in the private collection of "an eccentric artist" (ya think?) but worries it might be putrefying. Yeeeccchh. He also informs a customer, who thought he had a collection of musket balls, that they're actually something else entirely. I won't spoil it for you.

The second episode finds Evan encountering a puppeteer who's looking for a prosthetic limb, and a customer who has what appears to be a dead body in the trunk of his car.

Good times.

The show premieres Nov. 4 at 9:30 p.m. on Discovery Channel; after the launch, it will air Thursdays at 9 PM. You can find out more about Obscura Antiques and Oddities by clicking here; you can see a recent MA Post on the story by clicking here.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

"Tall Tales of the Totem Pole: The Intercultural Biography of an Icon"with Aaron Glass tonight at Observatory! Hope to see you there.

Tall Tales of the Totem Pole: The Intercultural Biography of an IconAn illustrated talk by anthropologist Aaron GlassDate: TONIGHT! Sunday, October 24Time: 8:00 PMAdmission: $5Books will be available for sale and signing

To mark the release of The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History, co-author Aaron Glass will discuss how carved heraldic monuments from the Northwest Coast have become central symbols for the Native American at large. Dispelling many common myths, he reconstructs the intercultural history of the art form from the late 1700s—when Europeans first arrived on the coast—to the present, and describes how two centuries of colonial encounter transformed these indigenous carvings into a category of popular imagination and souvenir kitsch. Glass presents theories on the origin of the totem pole; its spread from the Northwest Coast to World’s Fairs and global theme parks; the history of tourism and its appropriation as a signifier of place; the role of governments, museums, and anthropologists in collecting and restoring poles; and the part that these carvings have continuously played in Native struggles for sovereignty over their cultures and lands. From the (many) world’s tallest totem pole(s) to the smallest, from depictions of whites on poles to the use of poles in advertising, this talk will explore the multifarious histories of these iconic forms.

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Aaron Glass is an anthropologist and artist who works with indigenous people in British Columbia and Alaska. His past research, along with a companion film “In Search of the Hamat’sa” examined the ethnographic representation and performance history of the Kwakwaka’wakw “Cannibal Dance.” He has published widely on various aspects of First Nations art, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast, and was recently involved in the restoration of Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent film, “In the Land of the Headhunters.” Glass is currently an Assistant Professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where he is curating the exhibit “Objects of Exchange,” opening in January 2011.

To find out more, click here. You can read more about "The Material Transformation of a Cultural Icon" on Aaron Glass' blog Material World by clicking here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: Model pole by Charlie James, now in the UBC Museum of Anthropology, via Material World.

I have just been alerted to the launching of a new exhibit at the British Museum, "Journey Through the Afterlife: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead." The exhibit, as the British Museum website explains, will show not only examples of the Book of the Dead never before seen, but also funerary figures, statues and coffins illustrating "the the many stages of the journey from death to the afterlife, including the day of burial, protection in the tomb, judgement, and entering the hereafter," all with the aim of discovering "the important mythical and spiritual ideas of ancient Egyptian life and death."

Following is the full text description from the British Museum Website:

Journey Through the Afterlife:The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

Follow the ancient Egyptians’ journey from death to the afterlife in this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition focusing on the Book of the Dead.

The ‘Book’ was not a single text but a compilation of spells designed to guide the deceased through the dangers of the underworld, ultimately ensuring eternal life.

Many of the examples of the Book of the Dead in the exhibition have never been seen before, and many are from the British Museum’s unparalleled collection. These beautifully illustrated spells on papyrus and linen were used for over 1,000 years, and the oldest examples are over 3,500 years old.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these fascinating and fragile objects on display.

In addition to the unique works on papyrus and linen, superbly crafted funerary figurines (shabtis), amulets, jewellery, statues and coffins illustrate the many stages of the journey from death to the afterlife, including the day of burial, protection in the tomb, judgement, and entering the hereafter.

Digital media and recent research will be used to interactively interpret the Book of the Dead and complete scrolls will be reassembled and presented in their original form for the first time.

Journey with the Book of the Dead to discover the important mythical and spiritual ideas of ancient Egyptian life and death.

You can find out more about the exhibit--which runs from November 4 until March 6-- on the British Museum homepage by clicking here, can watch a short video introduction to the exhibition by clicking here, and can read more about it in today's Guardian by clicking here.

You can read an excerpt from the book (which will be available for sale and signing at the event) in New York Magazine by clicking here.

Full details follow; hope very much to see you there!

The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New OrleansAn illustrated lecture and book signing with Mark Jacobson, author Date: Friday, October 22Time: 8:00Admission: $5Books will be available for sale and signingFew growing up in the aftermath of World War II will ever forget the horrifying reports that Nazi concentration camp doctors had removed the skin of prisoners to makes common, everyday lampshades. In The Lampshade, bestselling journalist Mark Jacobson tells the story of how he came into possession of one of these awful objects, and of his search to establish the origin, and larger meaning, of what can only be described as an icon of terror.

Jacobson’s mind-bending historical, moral, and philosophical journey into the recent past and his own soul begins in Hurricane Katrina–ravaged New Orleans. It is only months after the storm, with America’s most romantic city still in tatters, when Skip Henderson, an old friend of Jacobson’s, purchases an item at a rummage sale: a very strange looking and oddly textured lampshade. When he asks what it’s made of, the seller, a man covered with jailhouse tattoos, replies, “That’s made from the skin of Jews.” The price: $35. A few days later, Henderson sends the lampshade to Jacobson, saying, “You’re the journalist, you find out what it is.” The lampshade couldn’t possibly be real, could it? But it is. DNA analysis proves it.

This revelation sends Jacobson halfway around the world, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where the lampshades were supposedly made on the order of the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch. From the time he grew up in Queens, New York, in the 1950s, Jacobson has heard stories about the human skin lampshade and knew it to be the ultimate symbol of Nazi cruelty. Now he has one of these things in his house with a DNA report to prove it, and almost everything he finds out about it is contradictory, mysterious, shot through with legend and specious information.

Through interviews with forensic experts, famous Holocaust scholars (and deniers), Buchenwald survivors and liberators, and New Orleans thieves and cops, Jacobson gradually comes to see the lampshade as a ghostly illuminator of his own existential status as a Jew, and to understand exactly what that means in the context of human responsibility.

To find out more, click here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Radiolab-related parasite film! Observatory's 2nd Annual Day of the Dead party! Pathology collections from Amsterdam! Forgotten surrealist film featuring mannequins with thematic after-party! Centuries of visions of the brain!

Full details for these recently announced events follow; Hope to see you at one or more of these wonderful presentations!

Also, if anyone out there might like to be considered as a volunteer at future Morbid Anatomy Presents events in exchange for free admission and an endless cup of wine, please contact me at morbidanatomy@gmail.com.

“Parasites: A User’s Guide:”A Short Film Screening with Filmmaker and Ecologist Sharon Shattuck, Radiolab AffiliateDate: Tuesday, October 26Time: 8:00Admission: $5The word “parasite” comes with loads of vile connotations, but in nature, nothing is purely good or evil. In the 27-minute experimental documentary “Parasites: A User’s Guide,” filmmaker Sharon Shattuck embarks on a journey to decode some of the most misunderstood creatures on earth.

The dramatic rise in autoimmune diseases, asthma, and allergies since the turn of the last century has confounded scientists, but some researchers think they have uncovered the key to controlling the skyrocketing rates: tiny parasitic worms called ‘helminths.’ Using a blend of handmade and digital animation, film, and music, Sharon dives headlong into the controversial discourse surrounding ‘helminthic therapy,’ with help from scientific researchers, proactive patients and a renegade entrepreneur named Jasper Lawrence. Through the seeming oxymoron of the ‘helpful parasite,’ Sharon questions the nature of our relationship with parasites–and suggests a new paradigm for the future. “Parasites: A User’s Guide” is a film about ecology, healing, and worms.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and an active helminth patient.

Bio: Before moving to Brooklyn, Sharon Shattuck studied tropical botany, and worked as a researcher with the Field Museum and the Smithsonian Institute in Panama. Following a grad stint in documentary media, she now works as an animator with Wicked Delicate Films (producers of “King Corn,” 2007) in Brooklyn, and is a contributor to the WNYC science show ‘Radiolab.’ Now, Sharon is touring the mainstream film fest circuit with her quirky science film “Parasites: A User’s Guide,” demonstrating that science can be both informative AND entertaining.

Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) PartyAdmission: $5Date: Sunday, October 31stTime: 5 PM - ?Please R.S.V.P. to salvador.olguin@gmail.com for party planning purposes.

Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) is celebrated annually in Mexico during the last days of October and the first days of November. It is a party to honor the dearly departed by presenting offerings to them, building an altar, and inviting them to reunite with the living in a nightly feast including their favorite dishes and drinks. It has deep roots in ancient, pre-Hispanic celebrations, but it also integrates the Christian traditions brought to the country by the Spanish –the main celebration takes place on November 2nd, coinciding with All Saints Day.

On Sunday, October 31th, and for the second year in a row, Morbid Anatomy and Observatory will host a Day of the Dead party in tandem with author and scholar Salvador Olguin. This year, we will build an altar dedicated to the Economy. Traditionally, the Day of the Dead altar is dedicated to a person whose death is deeply felt by the people building it; in spite of some hopeful reports by some cheerful voices, our global Economy does not seem to be recovering quickly enough from its recent collapse. This year, we will bring her some offerings, attract her with a few bottles of tequila, and lure her back to the realm of the living with the fragrant smell of incense and marigolds. Feel free to collaborate with our altar building by bringing objects that express how deeply felt the departure of the Economy was for you and your close ones. We want to entice the ghost of the Economy to walk again among the living, to come back from the afterworld and celebrate with us, Mexican style.

Many of this year’s features are based in the art of Jose Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printer and illustrator who worked around the time of the Mexican Revolution (1910), and who used his art to satirize prominent figures of his era. His best-known works are his calaveras (skulls), etchings depicting dancing skeletons, skulls dressed up as Revolucionarios and politicians, etc. Since this November we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, it felt natural to honor Posada by having a live version of one of his most famous calaveras: La Catrina. Made by Posada as a depiction of the skeleton of a rich lady, La Catrina has come to represent a satirical version of Death herself in Mexico. At our party, La Catrina will mingle with our guests, and people will be able to have their picture taken with her, in front of our altar.

At this year’s Dia De Muertos party, you will also find pan de muerto, champurrado (a traditional Mexican beverage), sugar skulls, marigolds, Negra Modelo, traditional foods and crafts, a community altar, a piñata of death herself to dash to bits, live traditional music, a death themed slide show produced by Morbid Anatomy, and, of course, Redhook vendors taco truck supplying delicious and authentic foodstuffs. If you would like to dress appropriately for the occasion, you only need to take an old suit or dress, or wear the clothes of a person whose death means something for you, or simply wear your everyday clothes: everything works, as long as you add a touch of the hereafter to it –some make up to look a little pale, a skeleton suit, some dirt under your fingernails. Or you can go all the way and dress up like one of Posada’s Calaveras.

We hope you can join us! Feliz Dia de Muertos!

Salvador Olguin’s work has been published in magazines both in Mexico and in the US. He is the author of Seven Days, a multimedia theatrical piece that celebrates the convergence of traditions and hybridism that characterizes Mexico’s fascination with mortality. He has worked extensively with Mexican cultural artifacts related with death. He is currently performing research on the metaphoric uses of prostheses in literature and the visual arts, at New York University, as well as writing poems about the life of plants and the genealogy of intelligent machines. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico and is currently based in Brooklyn.

Come and See: The Amsterdam Anatomical Collection DissectedAn illustrated lecture and book signing with Dr. Laurens de Rooy, Curator of the Museum Vrolik in AmsterdamDate: Thursday, November 11Time: 8:00Admission: $5Books will be available for sale and signing.

Two skeletons of dwarfs, rare Siamese twins, cyclops and sirens, dozens of pathologically deformed bones, the giant skull of a grown man with hydrocephalus, the skeleton of the lion once owned by king Louis Napoleon, as well as the organs of a babirusa, Tasmanian devil and tree kangaroo – rare animals that died in the Amsterdam zoo ‘Artis’ shortly before their dissection.

Counting more than five thousand preparations and specimens, the Museum Vrolikianum, the private collection of father Gerard (1775-1859) and his son Willem Vrolik (1801-1863), was an amazing object of interest one hundred and fifty years ago. In the 1840s and 50s this museum, established in Gerard’s stately mansion on the river Amstel, grew into a famous collection that attracted admiring scientists from both the Netherlands and abroad.

After the Vrolik era, the museum was expanded with new collections by succeeding anatomists. What motivated the Vroliks and their successors to collect all these anatomical specimens, skulls, skeletons, and monstrosities? were did their material come from? How did these collections help to built up their views on the origins of life forms?

Since 1984 the museum is located in the academic Hospital of the University of Amsterdam. Recently the museum collections were portrayed by the photographer Hans van den Bogaard for the book Forces of Form. These images will form an essential part in this talk, a ‘dissection’ of the Amsterdam anatomical collection.

Dr. Laurens de Rooy (b. 1974) works as a curator of the Museum Vrolik in the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam. He studie Medical Biology, specializing in the history of science and museology. during his internship he researched the collection of father and son Vrolik. In 2009 he obtained his PhD in medical history.

Screening: Hans Richter’s “Dreams That Money Can Buy” and “Ghosts Before Breakfast”A screening of Hans Richter’s 1947 surrealist film “Dreams that Money can Buy,” introduced by filmmaker Ronni Thomas and followed by a thematic after partyDate: Saturday, November 13thTime: 8:00 PMAdmission: $8

Tonight, join filmmaker Ronni Thomas as he presents a screening of the rarely shown and grossly unknown 1947 dada/surrealist film “Dreams That Money Can Buy.” The film was the brainchild of surrealist Hans Richter and features segments produced in collaboration with some of the great surrealists of the day including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst and John Cage. Though experimental, the film does have a narrative; the overarching story is a loosely film noir-styled story about a ‘dream detective’ and his various clientèle. This narrative structure makes the film more accessible than many experimental films, with elements of fantasy, science fiction, crime and horror which give the film a real driving edge. The film is a clear influence on filmmakers such as David Cronenburg, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and David Lynch.

There will be a short introduction to the film by Thomas followed by a thematic after party with specialty drinks and music.Thomas will also screen Richter’s short film “Ghosts Before Breakfast” before the feature film.

Tonight author Carl Schoonover will discuss his new book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams). Join us for a fascinating exploration of the brain through images. These beautiful black-and-white and vibrantly colored images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but most have never before been seen by the general public. From medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, we are invited to witness the fantastic networks in the brain. The result is a peek at the mind’s innermost workings, helping us to understand, and offering clues about what may lie ahead. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Carl Schoonover graduated from Harvard College in 2006 with a degree in philosophy and is currently a doctoral student in Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University Medical Center. He has written on neuroscience for the general public in such publications as Le Figaro, Commentaire, and LiveScience. In 2008 he cofounded NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists, writers, and those in between. He hosts the radio show Wednesday Morning Classical on WCKR 89.9 FM, which focuses on opera, classical music, and their relationship to the brain.

You can find out more about these events on the Observatory website by clicking here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Monday, October 18, 2010

This just in from the New York Times: The Brothers Quay--creators of so many memorable films including "The Phantom Museum," their homage to the Wellcome Collection--are in the process of producing a "as-yet-untitled documentary on the [Mütter] museum and its adjoining 340,000-volume library!" Better yet, when it is completed, the final film will be screened as part of a symposia to be hosted in turn by the Mütter Museum, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the incomparable Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Click here to read the entire story, entitled "Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet" in today's New York Times.

I really can't watch myself on video, but if you are curious to see what I had to say at last month's Copenhagen-based EAMHMS conference on the topic how medical museums might use wunderkammer-inspired techniques of curiosity and wonder as a strategy to draw people into engaging with scientific and historical objects, you can watch the above video.

To read a nice synopsis and analysis of my brief talk and the following spirited discussion on the blog Biomedicine on Display--the work of the hosting institution, Medical Museion--click here. To read the full abstract for the talk, click here.

Thanks, Thomas, for putting this video/writeup together, and for hosting such an engaging and thought-provoking conference!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

I have just been alerted by a number of friends and friends-of-the-blog about a really fascinating looking upcoming exhibition taking place later this year at an intriguing looking venue in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

The exhibition, entitled "Hygiene, the Story of a Museum,"explores, as the press release describes, "the both fascinating and dramatic background of the notion hygiene" via an investigation into the history of a particular storied institution, the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum of Dresden, founded in 1911 by a mouthwash magnate. The exhibition uses this particular and important history as a launching-off point to explore questions about how the notion of hygiene changed "from a scientific concept into a global movement" and how it was "subsequently used by the National Socialism in Nazi-Germany and the socialism of the former DDR as an essential part of both ideologies."

This exhibition will be on view from October 24th until January 30 at the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, The Netherlands, and was created in cooperation with the wonderful Dresden Hygiene Museum.

Marres, centre for contemporary culture presents its fifth exhibition in the context of the long-term program on the notion of the Avant-garde: Hygiene, the story of a museum.

The coming exhibition investigates the both fascinating and dramatic background of the notion hygiene. How did this word transform from a scientific concept into a global movement? How was it subsequently used by the National Socialism in Nazi-Germany and the socialism of the former DDR as an essential part of both ideologies?

Hygiene, the story of a museum approaches these questions through the history of the Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Founded in 1911 by the inventor of Odol mouthwash, this museum still represents a unique position. The museum does not necessarily collect art or design, but has actively contributed to the awareness of diseases such as TB and cancer. Primarily, this museum has a social function—from information to prevention and education—and it presents the physical results of that function in the form of casts of skin conditions, promotional films and educational material, which have been produced and presented by this museum until 'Die Wende'. The museum had the ambition to 'reveal that which had hitherto been invisible'. Developing new exhibition models to reach broader audiences has been a primary point of interest, and the use of new technologies such as film has been of big importance in that ambition.

The unique, social role of this a-historical museum and the specific attention for the exhibition as medium to make the invisible still visible makes the Hygiene Museum a fascinating subject. Especially for Marres, which has been investigating the role of the museum, the collection, the exhibition and the artist, and has attempted to address these questions through the development of new exhibition models for several years as well.

The project arose in cooperation with the Hygiene Museum, which made several unique loans available for the exhibition. An example is the so-called Glass Man (see above): admired as the symbol of the desire for a transparent body and reviled as the perverse outcome of rationalism gone too far. The exhibition consists of three so-called thoughtscapes, which through the use of several objects, films, printing material and texts approach the Hygiene Museum on three different levels:

Museum as Discourse focuses on 'making the invisible visible,' on striving towards transparency, which can be seen as a dominant ambition of the twentieth century. In Museum as Practice, the pedagogical strive for education on hygiene and the diffusion of scientific knowledge takes central place. Museum as Ideology offers insights into the meaning and the practical mission of hygiene in connection to the political and social-economical systems that characterize the Germany of the twentieth century.

Image: "Glass Man in the Buffalo Museum of Science:" In 1935 the Buffalo Museum of Science purchased a “glass man” from the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum. In the late 1980s, officials at the Buffalo Museum returned it to Germany, regarding the object as tainted by its Nazi associations. German Historical Museum, Berlin; Via DMHD.

Before they made a TV show about Hoarders, steadfast collectors were once held in great esteem. During the Renaissance, the "cabinet of curiosities," or wunderkammer, was a style of curation in the spirit of the sublime junk drawer, a display of weird stuff that didn't go anywhere else. A few hundred years out of fashion, they're starting to pop up again, and we've put together ten examples of our favorites, both full-fledged cabinets of curiosities and the sorts of specialized collections they might draw from. --Travis Korte, "Ten 'Cabinets of Curiosities' and Unique Collections from around the World," The Huffington Post

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Michael Sappol--friend of Morbid Anatomy and historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine--has just alerted me to the launching of a new website based on his recent exhibition documenting the rich and quirky collection of murder pamphlets in the collection of the National Library of Medicine.

From the press release:

A new website, "Most Horrible & Shocking Murders: Murder pamphlets in the collection of the National Library of Medicine," has been launched by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library. The site features a selection of murder pamphlets from the late 1600s to the late 1800s-from a treasure trove of several hundred owned by the Library.

Ever since the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s, public appetite for tales of shocking murders-"true crime"-has been one of the most durable facts of the market for printed material. For more than five centuries, murder pamphlets have been hawked on street corners, town squares, taverns, coffeehouses, news stands, and bookshops.

These pamphlets have been a rich source for historians of medicine, crime novelists, and cultural historians, who mine them for evidence to illuminate the history of class, gender, race, the law, the city, crime, religion and other topics. The murder pamphlets in the NLM's collection address cases connected to forensic medicine, especially cases in which doctors were accused of committing-or were the victims of-murder.

You can visit the website--which I designed, in fact!--by clicking here. All of the above images are drawn from the "pamphlets" section of the website, which contains these images along with a wealth of others; click here to peruse that section. Mr. Sappol is also the author of perhaps my favorite book about anatomical illustration, the incomparable "Dream Anatomy," which you can find out more about--and order!--by clicking here.

Thanks, Mike, for doing such wonderful work, and for alerting me to its launch!

"Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." --Police Mantra in Of Dolls and Murder

Wow. Looks like there is a new documentary film--narrated by none other than John Waters and featuring a cameo by our good friend John Troyer--about the fantastic and exquisite “Nutshell Studies” Dollhouse crime-scene dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee to serve as student aids in the 1930s and 40s.

The new documentary film, Of Dolls and Murder, explores our collective fascination with forensics while unearthing the criminal element that lurks in one particularly gruesome collection of dollhouses. Rather than reflecting an idealized version of reality, these surreal dollhouses reveal the darker, disturbing side of domestic life.

Created strictly for adults, these dollhouse dioramas are home to violent murder, prostitution, mental illness, adultery and alcohol abuse. Each dollhouse has tiny corpse dolls, representing an actual murder victim. In one bizarre case, a beautiful woman lays shot to death in her bed, her clean-cut, pajama-clad husband lies next to the bed, also fatally shot. Their sweet little baby was shot as she slept in her crib. Blood is spattered everywhere. And all the doors were locked from the inside, meaning the case is likely a double homicide/suicide. But something isn’t right. The murder weapon is nowhere near the doll corpses – instead the gun was found in another room.

Why would anyone create such macabre dollhouses? And why would anyone re-create crime scenes with such exquisite craftsmanship that artists and miniaturists from around the globe clamor (unsuccessfully) to experience this dollhouse collection in person?

Of Dolls and Murder investigates these haunting “Nutshell Studies” dollhouses and the unlikely grandmother who painstakingly created them – Frances Glessner Lee. Known as the Patron Saint of Forensics, Lee didn’t let gender biases and prescribed social behavior of a wealthy heiress keep her from pioneering the new arena of “legal medicine” in the late 1930s and 1940s.

To train investigators, Lee created 18 dioramas (20 actually, but two are missing) for detectives to study crime scenes from every angle, including the medical angle. She used only the most mysterious cases (cases that could have easily been misruled as accidents, murders, or suicides) to challenge students’ ability to interpret evidence. Almost 70 years later, Lee’s dollhouses are still relevant training tools because all the latest technological advances in forensics do not change the fact that crime scenes can be misread, and then someone will literally get away with murder. But the story does not end with Lee and her dollhouses of death.

The nation is obsessed with forensic justice television, and why? Why do we love to watch a skewed reality of crime-fighting forensics? The answer lies somewhere with the need we have to entertain ourselves with stories about our fear of untimely, brutal death. The societal truths about how loved ones often murder one another is far too wicked to face, let alone change. Instead, we prefer to escape into a safe haven where solving murders easily wraps up in under one hour.

For more about this production, visit the film's website by clicking here. You can read a post on the film by participant John Troyer--who just informed me that not only has the film been released (despite the website saying it is "still in production) but has already won Best Documentary at the Thrill Spy Film Festival in Washington, D.C.--by clicking here. For more on these amazing dioramas, check out Corinne May Botz's lush photo book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by clicking here.

Friday, October 15, 2010

This Sunday, October 17, the Morbid Anatomy Library--pictured above--will be open to the public from 1 until 6 PM. So feel free to stop by for a gawk, a perusal of the stacks, and perhaps even a bit of seltzer.

For more about the Morbid Anatomy Library and for directions and other such information, click here.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The wild and eerie Victorian world of Walter Potter, where baby rabbits go to school and weep over their blotted copybooks, and where Bullingdon Club-style squirrels puff on cigars as toads play leapfrog and rat police raid a drinking den, is being reassembled in London, seven years after his creatures were sold and scattered across the world.

The displays are being assembled at the reopened Museum of Everything, a pop-up museum in a former Victorian dairy, and later recording studio, in Primrose Hill, London...

Whilst in London last week, I had the very good fortune to attend a preview of The Museum of Everything's "Exhibition #3," a carnivalesque spree exploring all things collectory, side-show, circus, grotto, and taxidermological. One of the exhibitions more impressive achievements--and the reason I was there in the first place--was the attempt to re-stage Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermist Walter Potter's Victorian museum of curiosities, a noble feat achieved by borrowing an assortment of Potter's charming pieces from the assortment of lucky private collectors--including Damien Hirst, Sir Peter Blake, and Pat Morris--who acquired them after the museum was controversially divided at auction in 2003.

My friend Pat Morris--who spoke on Walter Potter at our recent Congress for Curious People-- loaned several of his own Potter pieces to the exhibition, most notably "The Death of Cock Robin, a truly epic tableaux depicting the funeral procession of the fabled Cock Robin as recounted in the well-known Englist nursery rhyme "Who Killed Cock Robin." This spectacular piece, as the Guardian describes, includes "more than 100 birds including a weeping robin widow and an owl gravedigger who has tumbled some tiny bones out of the soil while preparing space for the dead robin." For a visual (but please note: this image simply does not do the piece justice!), see third image down.

Besides being a collector of great proportion, Mr. Morris is also the author of the only extant book on Mr. Potter and his work, the lavishly illustrated and encyclopedic Walter Potter and His Museum of Curious Taxidermy, which you can buy in hardback or paperback by clicking here or here, respectively. You can also find out more about Potter, his work and his history by visiting the Ravishing Beast website by clicking here. You can read the full Genius or grotesquery?" article on the Guardian website by clicking here. To find out more about this exhibition--which will be on at least till Christmas--and the very curious Museum of Everything, click here.

An American half-dollar. An unspent matchstick. A beloved miniature swan stowed in a biscuit tin. A beaded crucifix. Tooth roots shaped like a tiny pair of pants. A padlock. Scads of peanut kernels and scores of safety pins. A porcelain doll prised from a throat. A metallic letter Z. A toy goat and tin steering wheel. Frozen twigs. Penny wafers. A Perfect Attendance Pin.

One of the most popular attractions in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection: a beguiling set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design. How do people’s mouths, lungs, and stomachs end up filled with inedible things, and what do they become once arranged in Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s aura-laden cabinet? Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, author Mary Cappello and artist Lisa Wood will stage an illustrated reading based on two distinct but companionate projects to have emerged from Jackson’s foreign body display: Wood’s thirty-three original assemblages (The Swallowing Plates) and Cappello’s nonfiction book, Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them (The New Press). Like Jackson’s design and deft manipulation of endoscopic instruments, like his endoscopic illustrations and his scrupulous attention to the nature of each foreign body caught, Cappello and Wood’s work excavates the relationship between corporeality, desire, and the object world. Their dossier of images and of incantatory texts promises to combine the uncanny, the beautiful, and the informative.

Note: Several of Lisa Wood’s plates will be on sale and on view, and attendees will be treated to a sneak preview of Cappello’s book which appears this January 2011, as well as details regarding the re-design and grand re-opening of the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Exhibit in the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Does every human being have one of these Things to show for himself in his life’s hereafter?: as if to say, here is what is left of me: what’s left of me is that-which-was-once-within-me.

Mary Cappello’s books include Night Bloom; Awkward: A Detour (a booklength essay on awkwardness that was a Los Angeles Times bestseller), and Called Back (a critical cancer memoir that won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize). Some of Cappello’s recent essaying addresses Gunther von Hagens’ bodyworlds exhibits (in Salmagundi); sleep, sound and the silence of silent cinema (in Michigan Quarterly Review); the psychology of tears (in Water~stone Review); and the uncanny dimensions of parapraxis and metalepsis (in Interim). A recipient of the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and the Bectel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Cappello is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) and a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island where she also teaches courses in Literature and Medicine. Swallow will appear in January from the New Press. Her latest book-length project on a single theme is a foray into sound and mood, tentatively titled In the Mood. For more information: www.awkwardness.org

Lisa Wood is a San Francisco based artist specializing in Victorian arts and crafts. Incorporating Victorian sensibilities into shadowboxes that memorialize the dead, dioramas that explore the hidden world of insects, mourning jewelry that captures the essence of the human spirit, and other curiosities that were inspired by what was collected, constructed and treasured at the time. This was an era when lingering disease and sudden death were inexplicable and everyday perils; an era when the very concepts of art and nature were challenged by technological innovations such as photography and medicine.

These fascinations join her work to the list of artists known as Victorian Revivalists.

Lisa sells her work to smaller boutiques and galleries as well as private collectors around the country. Her Swallowing Plate collection as well as her insect dioramas can be viewed at Gold Bug in Pasadena, the catalog is available at the Mutter Museum Store in Philadelphia.

To find out more, clickhere. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

All of the images you see above are drawn from a simply marvelous collection of anatomical illustrations tracing the evolution of medical knowledge in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868) as found on the Pink Tentacle website.

To see the complete set of images (well worth it, I promise!) and read more about them, check out the original piece by clicking here.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Romantic painters -- especially the Dutch Romantics -- were influenced by the landscapes, portraits and still-lifes of the Dutch 17th-century masters. Pieter Christoffel Wonder (1777-1852) painted a fascinating "Portrait of the Professor of Medicine Jan Bleuland" (1818), with the self-confident, bourgeois doctor standing in front of a skeleton draped with red arteries. It could have been part of Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" of 1632 -- portraying the same fascination with the interior workings of the human body.

Found in a review of the exhibition "Masters of the Romantic Period -- Dutch Painting 1800-1850" at the Kunsthal on the Wall Street Journal; you can read the article by clicking here, and find out more about the exhibition by clicking here. Image found on the Collectie Utrecht website which can be seen by clicking here.

Nice gif animation based on the 1925 film Wege Zu Kraft und Schönheit - Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur (The Way to Strength and Beauty), a film on modern body culture by Nicholas Kaufmann and Wilhelm Prager, as featured in this recent MA post.

To compliment the recent opening of Paradise, a year long event at Proteus Gowanus, Observatory explores the theme: Paradiso Contrapasso. In Dante’s Inferno, Paradiso Contrapasso distinguishes each sinner by making his or her punishment uniquely appropriate to the committed sin, so that every soul inhabits a Hell all its own.

For example, consider the story of Paolo and Francesca:An unlikely marriage is proposed between the beautiful Francesca and the rich, but ugly Gianciotto. Paolo, the handsome brother of Gianciotto seduces the young bride and they become lovers. When Gianciotto discovers their indiscretion, he murders them both. In Hell, Paolo and Francesca are fused together in an eternal embrace, wishing only to be separated.

As Dante journeys through Purgatorio and Paradisio, he does not revisit this technique of contrapasso. For our event, however, Observatory encourages artists to consider divine comedic retribution in all of its possible representations, and from sources such as the Bible and religious and esoteric cosmologies, the ethical philosophies of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Symbolist poetry, the works of Roald Dahl, the Wizard of Oz, Cautionary Tales, Folklore and Fairy Stories, the Twilight Zone, Modern Dystopias, etc. The emphasis is on “Divine” and “Comedy”, and on our superstitious fear of getting what we wish for!

To find out more, click here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.